Social Creativity: The Engine of Software Development in the Social Era

Shower moments. We’ve all had them. Even Archimedes had one. Suddenly, all the dots connect and an idea forms. (Yes. I know. Archimedes actually had a “bathtub moment” when he discovered how to measure the volume of a solid, but the principle is the same.) These soapy moments of creativity feel as though they come from nowhere, but do they really? Does any form of creativity emerge in isolation?

Let’s consider the dots; that is, those bits of datum that hang suspended in mental space until the steam from the shower brings them together. To be sure, they are all your mental notions. However, unless you existed in complete isolation prior to said shower, they came from your previous interactions with the real world. They represent your encounters with nature’s creations, other people’s creations, or your own previous creations. Even the most isolated moments of creativity depend on a single principle: Ex nihilo nihil fit, Latin for “Nothing comes from nothing.”

Every creation incorporates relevant components of all that came before it, by design or by silent accretion over eons. The iPhone depended on the old rotary phone. The car depended on the wheel. Supercomputers depended on the creation of numbers. The laser pointer depended on the first fire. All creativity is socially facilitated, as it depends on the output of other people’s minds. When we are exposed to others’ ideas, new forms of creativity are more likely. Bruce Nussbaum, in his book “Creative Intelligence,” provides historical evidence of this cumulative effect. In Florence, Italy during the Renaissance, “the presence of great artists tended to generate more great artists as they frequently collaborated.”

Information may want to be free, but creativity wants to be social.

In the same article in which Marc Andreessen offered his famous phrase “Software is eating the world,” he also observed that “All of the technology required to transform industries through software finally works and can be widely delivered at global scale.” However, what Andreessen missed is that software itself is not the engine of transformation. Rather, it is the social creativity underlying its development.

Specifically, this social creativity is happening in related but distinct forms across the world of software: in open source communities, inside organizations as they adopt community methods, across industries in “super communities” through which competitors collaborate, and in the tools with which software is built.

Social Creativity and Open Source Communities

Since the mainstreaming of Linux and the release of the source code for Netscape in the 1990s, the value of people collaborating through engaged communities of committers has been proven in multiple venues. Think cloud, big data, mobile, and social network infrastructure. The advancements in these areas could never have been produced in the confines of a proprietary model. These open-source communities are driven by many factors, but their main ethos is social and can be summarized as the following: share knowledge and effort, and work together.

This open methodology has been so profoundly successful companies have begun to wonder whether they can adopt the same social IT techniques inside their organizations.

Social Creativity and Inner-Sourcing

At the recent OScon open-source industry conference, Camille Fournier, Director of Engineering for retailer Rent the Runway, Apache ZooKeeper committer, and former Goldman Sachs VP, led a session entitled “Internal Open Source: Running internal projects with open source methods.” Fournier points out that even if an organization does not want to contribute to communities, the technologies, ethos, and processes of open source can be brought inside an organization. Not only does it improve “developer joy,” but also bringing this development style within an organization improves quality and reduces friction. Tim O’Reilly called this inner-sourcing about 10 years ago, and the idea is beginning to take root in even the most secretive corporate cultures. Its power lies in the inherent social nature of the creative process. When developers are able to access, use and build upon what their colleagues are creating, innovation can really take hold. A few standout examples include Thomson Reuters, Philips and Qualcomm.

Social Creativity and the Rise of the Super Community

A colleague of mine, Andrew Aitken, Founder of Olliance, the Black Duck Consulting Group, identified a recent trend he identified as “super communities.” Aitken points out, “…essentially, these super communities are vertical industry-driven open-source communities. The core driver for these groups is the recognition by certain industries that a substantial portion of the software they develop is non-differentiated software that absorbs a significant amount of resources that could otherwise be used to innovate, differentiate and compete.”

Financial services companies, health care organizations, and automobile manufacturers have joined together with their industry competitors to create communities within which they can all innovate. The power of social creativity is leveraged to pave the way for unique innovation, as opposed to basic, non-differentiated needs. Now imagine an organization’s membership in a super community, while it simultaneously adopts the social creativity methods of open-source communities internally – call this a social creativity multiplier.

Social Creativity and Developer Tools

The incredible popularity of GitHub is yet another example of the social nature of creativity in the world of software. In a recent study conducted by VentureBeat, GitHub topped the list of preferred developer tools. Why? As Jolie O’Dell, VentureBeat author, points out, GitHub “encourages social collaboration.” GitHub’s tagline? Build better software, together. This should not be surprising, especially given the values of the Internet generation.

A New Breed of Employees and the Source of Economic Value

From personal possessions to “private” moments to opinions, nothing is boxed away by today’s generation of connected digital natives. For them, a world that isolates creativity is anathema. Software developers of this generation have most likely spent their college years freely contributing creativity to the open-source community. Imagine telling them now, as they enter the workforce, that they must stop. Will the best and the brightest join such restrictive organizations? Companies that encourage the purposeful application of technology to expose, share, and repurpose innovation with fellow collaborators will lead with new forms of value. Put another way, while social behavior drives creativity, creativity drives economic value. Shower, or no shower.